Friday, August 01, 2008

Denver in Half a Day

Over the last couple of years, our vacations have been spent mostly at the beach. Virgin Islands in 2006. Maui and Kauai in 2007. This year we decided to shake things up by heading as far away from the beach as possible. Our destination for 2008: Colorado.

Our flight to Denver was seriously at the butt crack of dawn. The bad thing about that is ... well it's the freakin' crack of dawn. But the good thing about an early morning flight was that we got to spend a few hours sightseeing in Denver before driving to Manitou Springs that evening (more on that later). Let me say, we seriously made the most of those few hours.

First of all just getting out of the airport took a while ... it's that big! You seriously have to take a tram inside the airport just to get from one end to the other. We picked up our rental car  a plum-colored TrailBlazer  and headed to downtown Denver in search of Starbucks.

We found a Starbucks in the heart of downtown Denver, which turned out to be the starting point of our walking tour. We strolled by the State Capitol. Checked out the sculptures in Center park. We meandered by the art museum, main library and the iconic City and County of Denver building.

Our last stop in the district was at the U.S. Mint. I had tried to secure tickets for the tour of the U.S. mint a few weeks back, but they were sold out. And that was weeks before we even got there! The website says you can try to get into the tour if there is space available, but alas, there was none. So we had to settle for only seeing the Mint's cheesy gift shop.

Afterwards we made our way to the Larimer Square Historic District, which was really cute. Lots of quaint botique shops and restaurants. We made a stop for a caramel apple from Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, since we were so close to the Rocky Mountains. From there we made our way to Denver's 16th Street Mall, where we did a little more shopping before heading to our next adventure ...

1 comment:

OMG, Christine and I loved Denver when we went there last year. It's such a cool, metropolitan city and the food and handcrafted microbrew beers are the best I've ever had...

We would go back there again in a heartbeat. Next to Nashville and Memphis, Denver is truly one of our favorite cities in America.

And I kinda dug that "cheesy" gift shop at the U.S. Mint...sure, the decor was "double wide chic", but the stuff they sold was pretty cool. I bought a giant rubber penny magnet there that is the talk of our refrigerator magnet collection! :)